520 FAMOUS LIVING AMEBICANS Watterson was safe from defeat in his editorial poaitioiL The serious second thought of the people showed them clearly that he was right, and the negro gained the protection of the courts. This contest also showed him beyond question that a great editor could not afford to be a candidate for or to hold public office. There was at this time an organization of corrupt men high up in the management of the Republican Party. This gang in large measure controlled the Federal government. It kept itself in power very largely by waving the bloody shirt; that is, by denouncing the Democratic Party for bringing on the Cfivil War. Since it was necessary for this gang also to keep the South under military government, Federal troops were stationed at the polls. All the Southern leaders who had taken part in the war — and that meant practically all of them — were kept out of public life, their place being taken by a class of political buccaneers called carpet-baggers. The narrow policy of the Southern leaders in countenancing law- lessness in the South gave these men just the material they wished for their speeches to Northern voters. In the North politics were controlled by the soldiers, who still felt bitter toward the South. Surely it was a stupendous task which confronted the small group of Southern progressives. Here again many of Mr. Watterson *s Southern friends were unable to understand him. In vision he saw a New South without the slavery he had hated almost as much as Lincoln, with railroads, rivers, and canals busy carrying the commerce of the busy population, with cotton factories rivaling those of New England, with steel mills to use up the vast mineral resources in the Ap- palachian Mountains. While he talked and wrote of these beautiful visions, his heavy-footed companions could see noth- ing where he pointed but the wreck and ruin of a terrible struggle, and over all the heavy hand of the Northern op- pressor. There was a movement started by some of the more ag- gressive Confederate officers, Mr. Watterson among the num- ber, to organize a new party for the South, one free of the
